by Lexa Hillyer
Isbe knows she should be happy for Aurora—and she is—but she wonders miserably if everyone she loves will fly from her the moment they have a chance. Her mother, who she cannot remember. Gilbert. Aurora.
Will William be next?
She pushes the thought from her mind as the carriage comes to a halt.
Byrne, Isbe’s driver, offers her an arm. “Highness.” The title still makes her slightly sick. “Boar’s Neck Inn tonight,” he whispers.
She has come to depend on him to orient her at each of their stops along the royal road, as well as the many winding offshoots into various villages, some so small she has not even heard of them despite their being within a few days’ ride of the palace.
“Boar’s Neck? How inviting.”
“At least ’tisn’t another part o’ the boar, Highness.”
“Please, Byrne, I’ve asked you before.”
“Yes, sorry, Your High—Miss Isabelle.”
“Thank you. That’s much better.” She climbs out of the carriage. The afternoon air has gone crisp with the hint of evening. “Boar’s Neck . . .” she repeats. The name seems dimly familiar. “Byrne, can you tell me what land this is?”
“County of Chasseur, Miss Isabelle.”
Her pulse quickens. Chasseur.
The guards have already moved loudly ahead, entering and slamming the front doors of the noisy tavern attached to the inn. She can smell cooking meat and the sour scent of old ale. Normally she’d dine with them, demanding a tally of their latest recruits or finding someone who could pen a letter for her to send to William. It had made her heart race with pride two nights ago, when she was able to report more than three hundred recruits in a single village—made her feel certain she is helping Deluce. And it made her feel closer than ever to William, despite their being apart.
“Actually, Byrne, there’s a detour to be made.”
He pauses. “Yes, miss?”
“Are the others . . . dispatched for now?”
“Indeed, all of them inside the tavern, awaiting you any moment.”
“Good,” she says, stepping back up into the carriage. “Because they can’t know. You’ll have to tell them I’ve gone to bed early without any supper. Now let’s hurry.”
“Without your guard, Highness? It would be unsafe to—” he protests.
“Nonsense. You must do as I ask. And Byrne?” she calls in a whisper.
“Yes, Miss Isabelle?” He leans his head through the carriage door.
“Your discretion will be required.”
It will be dark soon and the roads unsafe to travel, even in a royal carriage—or especially so. But Isbe doesn’t care. She races down the lane toward Gilbert’s older brother’s cottage, her gloved hand trailing the fence for guidance, her heart leaping several steps ahead, her thoughts chasing one another in circles. What will Roul think of her now? Has he any news? How can she ever truly apologize for what she has allowed to happen? Was it a mistake to keep this visit a secret from the guards?
Surely Prince William would understand her concern for the man who had tried to help her seal Deluce’s alliance and who sacrificed both his luck and, probably, his life, to the effort. But a hidden part of her knows she can’t tell William about Gilbert. There is something too precious there, in her past, to share. Something that was unfinished, forever left open, unresolved. She loves William—she has given him her body, her soul, her independence, everything she knows of herself. But she can’t give him this too.
It is six-year-old Piers who spots her first, racing out into the yard, whistling and hollering and throwing his arms around her.
“Isabelle,” Roul says, coming up behind the boy. Emotion clots his throat.
Aalis’s mix of babble and whining follows closely. She is likely in the baby sack tied to Roul’s back, from the sounds of it, and Isbe realizes the little girl may not even remember her—it has been no more than a couple of months, but the memory of a toddler is fickle.
Roul wraps his arms around Isbe and she hugs him back, hard, as a desperate, wrenching wave unfurls in her chest, carrying mixed feelings she had hardly even realized were there: sadness and longing and guilt and hope.
“Oh.” Roul suddenly pulls away. There’s an awkward pause, and Isbe is unsure what’s happening. Then she realizes. Roul is bowing down before her.
Humiliation knots in her stomach, and her cheeks continue to burn even after Roul invites her inside his cottage, which feels somehow smaller than it did this winter when she first came here with Gil.
“We had not thought to see you under these . . . circumstances. Are you lodging close by?” he asks her, a faint formality entering his voice.
“Actually, I was hoping I might . . . stay here tonight,” she says, the admission painful to her own ears. She can’t safely return to the inn tonight, not without her guard—and not when she can never quite tell if she’s in hostile or welcoming territory.
But it’s more than that. She wants things to be the way they were, just for one night.
He is silent for a moment before replying, “It would be our honor, of course. Please, make yourself . . . well . . . comfortable.”
“Here, let me at least . . .” She ruffles Aalis’s hair, and picks the girl up, then allows Piers to pull her over to the rickety table, where she plops down, taking in the smells of filth and farm animal, which are far preferable to the putrid stench of the Boar’s Neck tavern creeping into the inn’s rooms.
“We been heard all kinds a talk about ya, Isbe!” Piers declares, clambering loudly onto a stool. “Maribelle, she says ya gone ta give all us magic powers what like the fae got.”
“Well, I don’t know about that—”
“Yeah, she says you got a magic shoe.” Magic. Isbe smiles at the word, then realizes that he is not wrong. Though she’d thought about it before, it only now begins to sink in that the slipper has to have been touched by the fae at some point. So how did her mother come to possess it?
Piers is rocking back and forth on his stool, clattering its legs excitedly as he goes on. “An’, an’, an’ she says ole queen Maffer shoots fire outta ’er mouth like a dragon. But Jacques, he says Maffer gone ta make us knights in ’er army!”
“That’s enough, Piers,” Roul says, setting down a small, rough portion of lamb’s meat and bread for them both, and gruel for the children.
Isbe shivers. The knights of LaMorte. The idea that Malfleur will make all her soldiers into knights with special privileges is a claim Isbe has heard chanted in many of the villages in southern Deluce. It still shocks and scares her how easily so many peasants have been swayed to believe stories just as outlandish as the ones Piers is spouting—how many truly seem to think joining up with Malfleur’s army is their best bet, and are either oblivious to her evil or willing to overlook it in exchange for power, weapons, the dream of being treated as important. She hopes she has managed to persuade at least some of them that they are wrong, that the faerie queen will never reward any of them. That they’d only be enslaving themselves to a despot.
That they are important.
She hopes that will be enough.
Because if Deluce remains this divided, it will fall.
“So . . . have you still had no word?” she asks Roul. She can’t bring herself to say Gilbert’s name aloud.
“No,” he whispers. “Nothing.”
Even though it’s what she expected, disappointment floods her, makes it difficult for her to swallow her food. “I would understand it if you hate me,” she whispers.
“Isabelle—”
“It’s my fault,” she rushes on, the confession pushing at her lungs, begging to come out. Guilt that she’s even here, when the prince has no idea. Guilt that she didn’t come sooner.
“He didn’t want to go,” she says. “He thought it was a terrible idea. He tried to talk me out of it. If I had listened . . .” Her thoughts have traveled down this road often enough. But she can’t finish her sentence, because it’s im
possible to say how different things might be now. The only certainty is that Gil would be alive. He would be here.
“Isbe, you can’t think that way. You must know,” Roul says quietly.
“Know what?”
He puts down his spoon. “Gil would have followed you anywhere.”
She jolts awake to the sound of Aalis crying. It’s the middle of the night. Isabelle must have been muttering in her sleep again and awakened the little girl. She hurries over to the tiny pile of straw close to the now-cold hearth and picks up the crying girl, swaying her in her arms, holding her young warm body against her own.
“Shhh,” she says, as the child begins to quiet. She breathes in the smell of her wispy, unwashed hair and thinks of the fact that Aalis’s mother died only a few months ago. She wonders what Aalis remembers of her. The girl settles into Isbe’s arms with the comfort of a little hedgehog burrowing into its home.
Isbe can tell by the weakness of light through the window that it’s not yet dawn. Roul will want at least another hour or two of sleep before the next hard day of labor.
“One night so mild, before break of morn . . .” She begins to sing the lullaby that always calmed her sister when they were young. Aalis’s sniffles seem to lessen, so Isbe continues, substituting the lyrics from her mother dreams, repeating the phrases until her throat aches.
At some point, she notices Aalis has fallen back to sleep. She lays her down on her pallet and tucks herself back into her own bed.
But as she drifts off again, she senses another presence in the room, in the doorway.
“Gil?” she whispers.
“I heard Aalis cry. Is everything all right?” he asks, stepping softly into the room.
She turns toward his voice. “Gil, is that you?”
“Of course it’s me.”
She feels confused, her head full of cotton. She gestures to Aalis, who is snoring softly, then whispers, “Let’s talk out there.”
She walks through the doorway and feels as though she is following a ghost.
He is silent, and she begins to doubt whether he’s really there.
“Gil?”
“Yes.” His voice reaches her, but she can’t tell where he’s standing.
Suddenly, she feels hot, confused, shaky. Gil is here.
Gil is here.
How can this be?
She is shivering uncontrollably, torn between racing into him and cowering. She turns away from his voice, overwhelmed, and feels her way around the kitchen automatically, relieved to discover the bucket from the well still has some water in it.
“What are you doing?” Gil asks.
“Heating the water, of course,” she answers, moving about in a numb fog. She locates the tinder and flint stacked four paces from the hearth, as Roul had shown her, and begins to light a fire, the flick and slash of stone on metal cutting through the stiffness of her thoughts. Still, her hands shake.
“But why?”
She’s confused by his question. “It’s the least I can do to help.”
The fire finally crackles to life, and she stands, remaining by the hearth to allow her legs to warm up and her head to clear. Think. Think.
She can feel Gil’s warmth and closeness when he comes up behind her. For a moment, it seems like he is going to touch her, but he doesn’t.
“I’m afraid this life is harder on you than either of us knew it would be,” he says quietly.
A protest forms on her lips. “No,” she whispers, turning to face him at last.
“Isbe.” His voice has gone low and wavering. She is terrified by what he might say next, and by what her own face must show. Gil is here. He is here. Unthinkably, impossibly.
He takes her hands in his, and the touch sends another shudder through her. He traces a finger along her cheek like he did on the boat, just before they were separated. “Isbe,” he repeats. “Isbe.”
“Isbe.” Roul’s voice shakes her out of the heaviness of sleep. She is freezing cold, her blanket and cloak cast somewhere off to the side.
And then she knows.
She wants to cry, openly and plainly, as Aalis did.
Because Gilbert is dead. He must be. Drowned out there in the open sea. She failed to find him, failed to save him. Instead she has gone on to fall in love with, and marry, a prince. And yet what she can’t admit to William is that she fears her questions about Gil will haunt her forever. She fears that their unfinished love will flutter like a moth in the secret closet of her heart, slowly eating away at the silks and fabrics of her memories, until one day it is the only thing left.
Back at the Boar’s Neck Inn, her guards are gathered in the courtyard yelling at Byrne, who is helplessly defending himself. “’Twas by her own orders I left her there!”
“It’s true,” she announces loudly. She can sense their attention turning to her, hear their surprised murmurs. “I specifically told Byrne to drop me off at a farm where I have distant family. I sent him home, figuring it would be less dangerous than returning in the dark.”
Isabelle can’t help but grin as the men fumble over themselves to either scold or apologize. She knows she must look ridiculous, with mud nearly up to her knees from the lengthy morning’s walk down the village lane to the tavern. But the walk rejuvenated her, brought her out of the murk of sadness and guilt and missing Gil. With a tall gnarled stick in her hand to use as a walking staff, and the spring sun bright on her cheeks and forehead, she’d felt more alive than she has in days.
In fact, she was reminded of something on this walk. Several things, really. One of which is the importance of having a plan.
Gil would have followed you anywhere.
No matter how he might reprimand or even resent her if he were here, she knows more than anything else that Gil would want her to go on. To prove everyone else in the world wrong.
To win.
As her guards scramble to give her further instruction, she holds up a hand. “Fetch me a lady’s maid,” she tells them. “At once.”
“But—”
“Have her prepare the finest dress she can find in my trunks.”
“But—”
“And obviously . . .” She smiles, nodding down toward her ripped and ragged clothes. “I will need a bath.”
A few hours later, Isbe steps out of her carriage wearing the fanciest, flounciest gown she could find on such short notice, follows the steep path up a hill, and raps on Lord Barnabé’s front door. During her walk, she had remembered that Binks lives within a short distance of Roul’s home—and that he trades in all kinds of things, but most of all luck, money, wine, and information.
As she waits for someone to answer, she recalls how she’d been scandalized that wagons full of Binks’s furniture were being carted off the last time she was here. Now the private road is silent, save for the stray, halting call of a mistle thrush.
So perhaps it is not surprising that Binks himself is the one to slide open the door’s viewing panel.
“You,” he says in a not-exactly-friendly tone. She’d recognize his high, pinched voice anywhere, and can’t help but picture him wearing a high, pinched ruffled collar to match.
She tries to control her annoyance with this nasty speck of vanity, this faerie who not only cheated her and Gilbert but whose tithe of luck led, however indirectly, to Gil’s fate. “Indeed, Lord Barnabé. That is the correct pronoun, though not the official title by which I prefer to be addressed.”
“Hmph,” Binks manages in response.
A silence follows, and Isbe can feel his suspicion through the thick, heavily bolted door. She imagines his eyes flicking between her and the royal carriage.
“Back for more stories, then?” he asks but immediately slams closed the panel’s metal grate before she can respond.
A moment later, he swings open the door itself with a whoosh and a creak.
Without waiting for an invitation, Isbe pushes past him into the airy foyer. “I take it your servants have fled.”
Binks bristles, causing some sort of large necklace—hideously gaudy, no doubt—to jangle about his neck. “Not all of them. My tailors are very loyal.”
“A shame your tailors won’t stoop to answering your door for you.”
“I—”
“Lord Binks, I’m not here to discuss the status of your household affairs.”
“What business have you—”
“Please, shall we make our way to your offices?” It is clearly not a question.
Binks doesn’t offer her a guiding arm, simply marches ahead, leaving her to follow merely by the clop of his too-high heels. Isbe’s not offended. Her anger plays into determination, even pleasure. She clutches the small satchel that carries her glass slipper, tied tightly to her belt, and savors the way her expensive gown swishes across the slick marble floors, sending a quiet message of status. She knows he knows: he is outranked and has no choice but to entertain her. She is the queen of Deluce—and what good is the title if she can’t use it to get her way now and then?
She sits down in his plush, silencing study, in the same chair Gilbert sat in to play heart of harts with Binks, a game that he lost because Binks marked the queen card. Resentment and disgust bubble up in her chest, and it’s all she can do not to launch into a thousand insults.
“I need some information,” she explains. “A census of the living fae, and in particular those who still possess large swathes of land and control.” She could swear she can hear him lift an eyebrow, and her hand moves again to the pouch at her waist, feeling for the slipper without thinking. “The palace library contains many histories of the fae, but no current census,” she adds.
And besides, she can’t very well read them. None of the servants can read them. William could, but she can’t ask him to do that, not when he’s at this very moment staging a battle outside of the hills of Nuage in southern Deluce.
“What makes you think I even possess such a thing?” Binks sits back in his pillowed seat with a muffled squeak.
